January 15, 2013

It's Confirmed, Fashion and Interior Design Can Definitely Meet Again (At Least According to Miuccia Prada)

It took quite a few years, or rather decades, but in the end it happened: fashion shows and interior design go once again well together. Three years ago we wondered on this site if this could have happened calling to mind how, in the late '60s, Ottavio and Rosita Missoni showcased their collection at the Solari swimming pool in Milan, sending out models floating on the water sitting on inflatable armchairs and sofas designed by Quasar Khanh, who, clad in a futuristic tuxedo with silver lapels, greeted the audience from a gigantic floating house.

Fashion and interior design were explored again together last year by designer Marga Weimans who presented in her "Fashion House: The Most Beautiful Dress in the World" installation, a series of spaces linked to a designer's life and career - a studio, a boardroom, a flat, an archive and even a flagship store - analysing how they can impact on the creations of a designer.

Fast forward to last Sunday when Miuccia Prada showcased her Autumn/Winter 2013 menswear collection in Milan in a set (described by the fashion house in a press release as "the ideal house") as usual created by Rem Koolhaas' AMO, with pieces of furniture produced by Knoll.

The clothes – and this is what surprised the fashion media – were normal, conventional, in the sense that they were wearable, even though there was a sort of studied carelessness in those untucked shirts with their collars askew matched with houndstooth trousers. Luxury was still in the tailored camel coats, velvet-trimmed coat collars, thick-soled brogues with chunky soles and boxy leather jackets in glossy turquoise, red and yellow

Worn out leather coats, the bastion of any serious protest wardrobe in Italy in the '70s came back maybe as a nod to Miuccia's time as a student with left-wing sympathies or maybe to make us all realise that some pieces never go out of fashion.

Miuccia explained the media that this exercise in banality was a quest for perfection and while she was probably taking the piss out of the journalists and doing it perversely well, the trick may actually work.

Think about it: in the last few years we have seen it all on the catwalks, from odes to death to bizarre extravaganzas celebrating life, even though we have also often seen unwearable and undesirable clothes that seemed to reflect the confusingly complex times we are living in. Albeit with double frills down the front, Prada's simple checked shirts may represent a banal yet saleable normality, and a call to keep on sobering things up also in other disciplines, politics included (an understandable call especially in Italy where the election campaign is underway and with Berlusconi the caiman planning his return...).

And while in June Prada will change script once again and tell us that extravagance is probably back, for the time being normality is not only a provocation, but the revolutionary key to restore sales and reputation.

Or maybe the provocation stood in the modernist sets recreated in the brand's space in Via Fogazzaro: designed by Rem Koolhaas's research unit AMO with geometric furniture produced by Knoll, the set recreated the ideal house providing interior and exterior views (the latter were created through digital moving images of high rises, clouds, birds or a cat).

The "ideal apartment" called to mind Marga Weimans' fashion house/most beautiful dress installation, though in Prada's case, rather than looking at the spaces conceived and needed by a fashion designer, the focus was on a space populated by an imaginary wealthy bourgeoisie, hence the angular wood, metal and Plexiglass furniture with random objects scattered around including guitars and typewriters in wood or foam and armchairs with embossed 3D geometrical motifs.

Caveat spectator, though, the retro-futuristic set/installation was also a showroom: while Prada does not intend to go into furniture production like all the main fashion houses during the Salone del Mobile, the furniture on display were anticipations of the 12 pieces of essential design created by OMA for Knoll that will be launched during the Salone in April. So that was the key to the puzzle: the catwalk-cum-interior design installation was a way to sell us “normal” clothes and avant-garde pieces of furniture.

Yet this could be good news: the clothes could be a reaction to the useless art of bizarrely extravagant and embarrassingly clownish menswear we witnessed in the last few years (impossible not to think about Thom Browne, the reason of many heart attacks amongst classic menswear tailors...), they could hint at the end of a gender bending obsession that certain designers, stylists and PR agents took to ridiculous limits and, above all, the end of the bearded gentleman (no beards in sight on Prada's runway, thank God) and of assorted obnoxious dandies in pretty slippers (so soon, though?). Who knows, this could be the revenge of the geek employed to refocus attention on clothes and furniture.

One thing's for certain: we may not see Koolhaas like Quasar Khanh in a futuristic tuxedo greeting the visitors at the 14th Venice International Architecture Biennale but expect Prada to be there. Who knows, the fashion house may even do the June menswear show there next year (is this the actual reason why the Biennale will open in June rather than in September?) finally turning 2014 into the fashion and architecture year. Mind you, in case that happens, don't forget to tell Miuccia we were there first.